This invention addresses a problem of providing the correct number of tabs for a tabulated document and includes an apparatus and method for selecting a desired number of tab media and balancing the selected number to provide a professional appearance for the printed document.
Tabulated documents have tabs that extend from one edge of the document. The tabulated edge of the document is, by custom, opposite the bound edge of the document. If the document is a conventional book that is bound on its left hand side, then the tabs extend from the right edge. If the document is bound at it top edge, the tabs extend from the bottom edge. The appearance of a document is enhanced when the tabs are balanced by having its tabs equidistantly spaced along the tabulated edge. Tabs are normally pre-cut into ordered banks with a fixed number of tabs per bank. Tabs may be inserted into a document automatically and others have an apparatus for discarding unused tabs. However, the appearance of the document is improved by equally spacing the tabs from each other along a tabulated edge. At present, operators of printing machines manually space or balance tabs by removing selected tabs from one or more banks before the tabs are inserted into a document.
Tab stock is pre-cut and manufacturers often provide ordered banks of consecutive tabs with the position of each consecutive tab being offset from a previous tab by an amount approximately equal to the width of the tab. For example, one ordered bank of tabs for a page of a given size may include five tabs, with each tab having a tab portion of about one fifth the tabulated edge of the document. If the ordered bank has ten tabs, then each tab has a tab portion of about one tenth the length of the tabulated edge. In a tabulated document, as the page number increases, the position of the tab along the tabulated edge moves down the edge (or from left to right). Once the tab position reaches the bottom of the page (or the right edge), there is a full bank of tabs. The number of tabs in a bank may range from one or two to five or ten or more tabs. A print job may not use a full bank of tabs.
For example, suppose a document has three chapters and a full bank of tabs has five tabs. Two of the five tabs are unused and have to be discarded from the printed document. The system that performs the print job needs a way to determine which tabs are actually used, and which have to be discarded while the job is printing (for tabs from the middle of the bank), or after the job is printed (for tabs at the end of the bank). The problem can be solved manually by removing two of the five tabs from each of a number of banks of tabs that corresponds to the number of copies made of the document. Then the system will pull the remaining tabs from the tab storage bin and insert the tabs in the desired location in a manner well-known in the art. Users also want and often need the ability to place text on the cut tabs without having to determine the printable area every time a new tab is added to a document, and without having to place the text manually on the tab so that it stays within the imageable area.
Document software such as ImageSmart Document Mastering™ from Heidelberg Digital LLC or Rochester, N.Y. is a collection of plug-ins based on Adobe Acrobat and a portable document format (PDF) workflow. The software is capable or creating tabs for PDF documents. With the current ImageSmart Document Mastering™ tools, the problem of discarding unused tabs has been solved by adding the unused tabs to the document and selecting an alternate finishing device for those pages. The tab text is usually placed on the tab by manually moving the text (e.g. with the Acrobat TouchUp Object Tool) to the desired location or by using document creation applications (e.g. MS Word) to create the tabs. Such documents are then converted to PDF before they are used with the ImageSmart Document Mastering™ software.
Others have attempted to solve this problem by counting the number of tabs in a bank (e.g. a bank of five tab stock is used in a document, only three tabs are actually used in the document, so the printer has to kick out five−three=two tabs). The user no longer has to keep track of how many tabs are used, and which of the tabs have to be kicked out. Also, text is placed automatically, removing the guess-work from the process of manually placing text. When doing this manually, the user has to be aware of how many tabs have already been used in the document, determine the position of the text on the tab either by calculating it or looking the position up in a table that was pre-calculated and then using either Acrobat tools and a relatively complicated workflow, or a third party tool to actually place the text on the tab.